WHIPPING

Definition

A form of corporal punishment imposed by judicial sentence, consisting of the infliction of a set number of lashes or stripes upon the offender's body, typically administered at a whipping post. Historically available as a standalone punishment or as an accompaniment to imprisonment. At common law, whipping was primarily reserved for persons of inferior social station convicted of petty larceny, vagrancy, and related minor offenses. Its use in American jurisdictions varied widely by state and, in some, by the sex of the offender and the nature of the crime.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A punishment of being whipped; also a heavy defeat, a cooking technique for cream, or various cordage and sewing senses. Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of striking with a whip; specifically, legal punishment by lashing, often administered at a whipping post. The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow but worth noting: the ordinary sense of "whipping" encompasses anything from a kitchen technique to a sports blowout. In legal sources, the term is precise and formal — a judicially ordered, procedurally defined punishment administered under authority of law, distinct from informal or private corporal chastisement. Researchers encountering the term in historical legal records should not read colloquial connotations into it.

Common Confusion

Whipping should not be conflated with other forms of historical corporal punishment such as flogging (a term used more commonly in military and maritime contexts, though often synonymous), stripes (the marks or the act, used interchangeably with whipping in some sources), or birching (a distinct form using birch rods, more common in British juvenile justice). In American legal records, "whipping" and "stripes" frequently appear as equivalent terms within the same statute or sentence. The whipping post — the physical apparatus — appears as a distinct legal term in some codes and should be distinguished from the punishment itself when reading statutory language.

Why It Matters in Research

Structural pattern: historical evolution. Whipping's legal significance lies almost entirely in its historical arc — its abolition is as legally important as its practice. Researchers face several traps in historical sources: First, availability by sex: Several jurisdictions expressly exempted women from whipping. Delaware, one of the last American states to retain the punishment into the twentieth century, applied it to men convicted of felonies but not to women. England abolished whipping of female offenders in 1820 (1 Geo. IV, c. 57). A sentence record that does not specify sex may reflect different legal authority depending on whether the offender was male or female, and researchers should not assume uniform application. Second, class and status markers: Anderson's note that common law whipping fell on "inferior persons" is not incidental — it reflects a formal legal distinction in many historical systems between punishments thought suitable for different social ranks. This has direct bearing on how whipping appears alongside other penalties in historical records. It is an indicator of how courts categorized defendants, not merely what they did. Third, constitutional status: Bouvier cites conflicting authority on whether whipping constitutes cruel and unusual punishment — a live question during the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century the constitutional tide had clearly turned, and modern Eighth Amendment doctrine effectively forecloses judicial whipping in American jurisdictions. Researchers working across different time periods should not assume a consistent constitutional baseline. Fourth, abolition is uneven: Bouvier's observation that whipping "has yielded in most of the states to the penitentiary system" reflects an ongoing, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction process rather than a single legislative moment. Delaware retained judicial whipping until 1972. Researchers tracing criminal justice reform should treat whipping's abolition as a moving target and verify jurisdiction-specific timelines. Fifth, the whipping post as a distinct legal artifact: Statutes, appropriations records, and local government documents may reference the whipping post as infrastructure — a physical installation — separately from the punishment itself. Both types of sources bear on the legal history and should be tracked independently.

Historical Dictionary Support

The four source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition: whipping is the judicial infliction of stripes as punishment. The variation is in detail and emphasis. Black's (both editions) offers the most compressed treatment — little more than a sentence noting the practice existed in England and a few American states. The second edition entry appears to contain typographical errors (likely a scanning artifact: "iode" for "mode," "Amerivan" for "American") that researchers should recognize as corruptions of the first edition text, not substantive differences. Anderson's is the most useful of the four for corpus research. It situates the punishment in its common law context (petty larceny and vagrancy), notes the English abolition as to female offenders, and flags the whipping post as a separately defined legal concept. Its reference to Victorian-era English statutes (24 and 25 Vict.) — though the entry appears truncated — points researchers toward a period of active legislative reform that the American dictionaries do not address. Bouvier provides the most legally substantive entry, noting specific jurisdictional retention (Maryland for wife-beating, Delaware for all felonies except as to women), engaging the constitutional question through conflicting case authority, and documenting the shift toward the penitentiary system. What Bouvier does not address — and what none of the historical dictionaries fully capture — is the racial dimension of whipping's administration in American practice, which is extensively documented in primary sources but largely absent from the doctrinal literature these dictionaries reflect. All four sources treat abolition as effectively accomplished by the time of their writing, but the actual legislative and constitutional process extended well beyond the periods in which Bouvier and Anderson were writing.

Jurisdictional Note

American jurisdictions diverged sharply on whipping's scope, retention, and abolition. Delaware was the last U.S. state to formally abolish judicial whipping, doing so in 1972. Maryland retained whipping for wife-beating well into the twentieth century. Researchers should not generalize from any one state's statutory scheme to the broader American picture, and should verify whether a given jurisdiction's statutes distinguished by offense type, offender sex, or offender age.

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